The church year starts with the first Sunday in Advent – that’s next week – and ends here, at the end of the season of Pentecost. And we close with a passage from the often misused Revelation to John. Many folk come to Revelation with a lot of baggage, most of which comes from fundamentalist, fire-and-brimstone preachers who look to Revelation as a supposed road map to the end-times, who parse every jot and tittle in an effort to put together a timetable of the end of all things, and a roster of who will be in and who will be out of God’s kingdom.

And yet, what Revelation is at heart all about is a word of comfort and hope. This ending book of the Bible is a fitting book-end and counterpart to the opening book of the Bible, Genesis. Just as Genesis is all about creation, Revelation is all about re-creation; just as Genesis affirms that it is God’s hand at work in the beginning, so too Revelation affirms that it will be God’s hand at work at the end, making all things new and full of God’s glory.

I know that today, this week, this brief time before the onrush of the often forced gaiety of the pre-Christmas season, I personally am glad that it doesn’t always have to be hard, I personally am grateful for the comforting words from the Revelation to John, and I personally welcome all the good news that God might send my way. Because if church doesn’t always have to be hard, life oftentimes is, and there is a heaviness in my heart of late that I know I cannot remove all on my own. Let me share some of that with you.

In May I became an orphan, something that happens to most of us at some time or another, if we live long enough, but a blow nevertheless. My father died in May, and while he had a long and blessed life – like me, he lost his first wife, my mother, to cancer, and then miraculously found love again and remarried happily – still, I miss him just about every day. This Thanksgiving holiday was the first in memory we did not share together, and out of sheer habit I still find myself wanting to pick up the phone on Sunday nights just to check in. And then there is Rev. Rajkumar and his wife Thaya and their one year old son; we have had a mission partnership with Rev. Rajkumar and the church he serves over these past five years or so, and Christie and I were privileged to spend a few days with him in Sri Lanka when I was on sabbatical back in 2004. The renewing of the civil war, with its abductions, extra-judicial killings, and economic hardships have placed them in severe danger. This danger was highlighted by the recent assassination of a Tamil member of parliament – a man who not only was a friend of Rev. Rajkumar, but who also spoke at the dedication of the parsonage and the parish hall which West Parish funded that Christie and I attended. I worry constantly about Rajkumar, his family, and his ministry, and wonder if they will ever know security, peace and justice. I think of how the challenges we face in ministry here pale by comparison to the struggles and risks Rajkumar and his fellow pastors there endure.

Many of you likely have known hard times of late. The hard times that are so much a part of life even in the 21st century, even in the wealthiest nation on earth. Unemployment. Financial stress. Loss of health, illness, disease, disability. Heartbreak. Loneliness. Loss. Aimlessness. The sin that breaks through our resolve and enters into our hearts and our actions. And yet at the same time we face the age-old challenge of remaining faithful – of facing situations where we must decide between being faithful and being successful, or being faithful and being popular, or being faithful and being comfortable, refusing to confront injustice and idolatry.

The Revelation to John was written to the churches in Asia late in the first century, at a time when their members were being persecuted under the Roman emperors Nero and Domitian. There was of course no such thing as separation of church and state at the time; indeed, the emperor claimed to be “Lord” and “Father” of all people, and those who refused to address the emperor in these terms were subject to persecution and death. As Christians confessed Jesus, not Caesar, as “Lord”, they were particularly susceptible to persecution. Remaining faithful was a challenge, and the pressures to accommodate the demands of the emperor and his cult were immense, for remaining true to God there would be a cost. Hard times, indeed – times that called for a word of comfort, encouragement, and hope. A word that comes right here, in the opening lines of Revelation, a word not only to those churches long ago, but to us today as well.

“Grace and peace to you from him who is and who was and who is to come . . . ‘I am the Alpha and the Omega,’ says the Lord God, ‘who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty.’” These words offer a declaration of hope, affirming that long before the Roman emperors were born, and long after they will have breathed their last, God is. These words promise that there is nothing not encompassed by God’s love – just as the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet enclose all the letters, so too God’s love is so expansive that nothing, not hardship nor persecution, not suffering nor loss, not fear nor anxiety, lies beyond God’s compass. In the beginning: God. In the end: God. In the midst of life: God.

These words speak to us of the hope in which we live, because we know who is really in charge not only of our lives, but of the future beyond our imagining. We know who the Lord of History is, who has reigned, who will reign, who reigns even now.

For the Christ who set us free from the power of sin through his faithful witness in the face of injustice, still comes to liberate us from bondage to sin, still reaches out his hand not to strike us down when we sin, but to lift us up to a higher plane.

The Christ who was the firstborn of the dead, the first to be raised from death to life eternal, still offers to each of us and to this whole groaning world resurrection to life eternal and abundant, the promise that no suffering, no privation, not even death, shall have the final word for us. We have no mere expectation or promise that God will triumph over evil and death – the present power of God is made manifest through Christ’s resurrection, the essential victory has already been won for us.

The Christ who is the ruler of the kings of the earth assures us that no petty ruler of flesh and blood, no matter how many legions of soldiers, cells of terrorist bombers, or detachments of death squads, can last in the face of the restorative and healing power of the eternal and Holy God. How wonderful it is to know that we are held in the palm of the hand of the One who makes all the little caesars of the world look foolish indeed.

Here we are, at the end of the church year, at the end of the Bible; and there we will be, at some point for all of us, at the end of all things. And this is our faith, this our hope: that in the end, as in the beginning, God -- the God who is, who was, and who is to come.

Good news for me; good news for my family; good news for Rev. Rajkumar; good news for us all. Amen. ------------